James Heartfield

James Heartfield (born 1961 in Leeds) is a British writer and lecturer. He has published widely on international politics, empire, art, and design. He wrote The Aborigines' Protection Society, 1837-1909 (Hurst, 2011) and An Unpatriotic History of the Second World War (ZER0, 2012). His Ph.D. thesis (awarded by the University of Westminster) was published as The European Union and the End of Politics, by ZER0 in 2013.

Heartfield has written for ArtReview, Spiked Online, and The Times Education Supplement.

Heartfield has been critical of government policies on the creative industries, talking and writing on the illusions of the knowledge economy. In the 1980s he was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Nick Bell named Heartfield as "one of the most important commentators on design". In May 2006, with Julia Svetlichnaja he interviewed the Russian dissident, Alexander Litvinenko. The interviews were published after Litvinenko's death.

In April 2019, Heartfield announced that he was standing as a candidate for Nigel Farage's Brexit Party in the 2019 European Parliament election in the United Kingdom. He was fourth on the party list for Yorkshire and the Humber and did not gain a seat.

In August 2019, he announced that he would be standing as a Brexit Party candidate in Islington North, the constituency of Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn. He later stood down and was replaced by Yosef David.

He lives in north London and is married with two daughters, Holly and Daisy.

• The Blood-Stained Poppy: A critique of the politics of commemoration London, Zer0 Books, 2019
• The Equal Opportunities Revolution London, Repeater Books, 2017
• The British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society London Hurst Books/Oxford University Press, 2016
• Who's Afraid of the Easter Rising? (with Kevin Rooney), London Zer0, Books, 2015
• The European Union and the End of Politics London, Zer0 Books, 2013
• British Workers & the US Civil War London, Reverspective, 2013
• Unpatriotic History of the Second World War London, Zer0 Books, 2012
• The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909 Hurst (London), and Columbia University Press (New York), 2011
• Green Capitalism: manufacturing scarcity in an age of abundance Openmute, 2008
• Let's Build! Why we need Five Million Homes in the next 10 Years (Audacity, 2006)
• Escape the Creative Ghetto, with Chris Powell, NESTA, 2006
• Creativity Gap Blueprint, 2005
• The "Death of the Subject" Explained Sheffield Hallam University Press, 2002
• Great Expectations: the creative industries in the New Economy London, Design Agenda, 2000
• Need and Desire in the Post-material Economy Sheffield Hallam University Press, 1998
• Sustaining Architecture in the Anti-Machine Ageco-editor with Ian Abley, London, John Wiley, 2002.